NeoCities • Hacker News Board

Re: NeoCities

#161

Post by belorn » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #114

belorn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has a 1gb/s flat rate at home, I have thought about doing something similar. It really isn't that expensive to have a bit of network and a server that gives out static content.

Til someone puts something copyright or worse on it.

We were talking about the expenses of running the service, and not the legal space around hosting user generated content.

The legal questions are interesting, through it highly depend on the country and political tendencies from one year to the next. In theory, I could run this kind of service in Sweden, and only remove content on order by a judge. In theory. In practice, there might not be any difference between hosting user generated content and simply having a website up hosting in ones own name.

Re: NeoCities

#162

Post by vulgrin » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:09 PM UTC

-1 for not re-implementing tag

Re: NeoCities

#163

Post by toni » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:12 PM UTC

I've hacked a little script together[1] for uploading all the files in a directory into NeoCities. Handy if you are working on your site and want to upload everything in one go.

Set your username and password at the beginning of the script and run it with the path to the directory as an argument:

./neocities-uploader.php /path/to/my/site

[1] https://github.com/pwlin/neocities-uploader

Re: NeoCities

#164

Post by kyledrake » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:27 PM UTC

csense wrote: post #136

kyledrake wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here, I'll do one better: If anyone is concerned about the nature/security of the site, here is the source code to NeoCities, ready for anyone to do a full security audit: https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web Pull requests welcome!

Why did you choose Ruby as the language?

It's what I know. And very productive in general. Nginx and the kernel (sendfile) does all the heavy lifting of serving the static files.

Re: NeoCities

#165

Post by kyledrake » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:34 PM UTC

stinky613 wrote: post #17

kyledrake wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site will very easily pay for itself with donations. It's not that expensive to serve static HTML, especially when you are using Nginx and sendfile.

That wasn't really my point. It doesn't inspire confidence when the host says "hey! put your stuff here! I'm not sure that I can pay the bills each month but I sure hope we can. Oh--and I have no idea how this will scale." It's all understandable. But even if it's free and even if my content is stupid, I'd still feel a little uncomfortable because of how much doubt the owner expresses over the viability of the servic…

Fair. Sorry about that.

I have a lot of experience scaling web applications, I've been doing this for over 14 years. I should probably highlight that somewhere.

I've already gotten enough donations today to run the server as-is for 8 months! I also found a sweet deal with a reliable dedicated provider via a tip that will cost substantially less than my intial estimates.

Re: NeoCities

#166

Post by PavlovsCat » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:34 PM UTC

darseex wrote: post #146

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, backstory: http://mike.winterdiamond.com/history.php

You'd think he'd have learned his lesson about god-awful site design.

You'd think people would have learned that the internet is all about me, and that I prefer content over packaging :(

Re: NeoCities

#167

Post by kyledrake » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:35 PM UTC

Simucal wrote: post #16

kyledrake wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site will very easily pay for itself with donations. It's not that expensive to serve static HTML, especially when you are using Nginx and sendfile.

Does Nginx use sendfile under the hood or is it something you would use separately?

https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web/blob/master/files...

Re: NeoCities

#168

Post by leke » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:52 PM UTC

leke wrote: post #126

Great news! http://420.neocities.org/

Hmmm... Even though index.html page was overwritten, it still displays the old index page.

Here is an updated version.

http://420.neocities.org/index.html

Re: NeoCities

#169

Post by serf » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 10:57 PM UTC

I like the idea, but GeoCities left a bad taste in my mouth. What makes this site any more maintainable than GeoCities was? The fact that it's donation based and not at the whims of a corporate entity is reassuring, but other than that it seems as if the footing would be even less stable. Am I wrong?

Re: NeoCities

#170

Post by fragsworth » Fri, Jun 21, 2013, 11:22 PM UTC

kyledrake wrote: post #103

slg wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, I should have reached out to you directly with this issue. I took the easy route and didn't put in any effort to track you down, for that I am sorry. However, I take exception to you categorizing my post as "trashing other people's work." I feel that I also have a responsibility to publicize such a glaring security hole in your site. This is the number 1 link on HN at the moment. Thousands of people ar…

Here, I'll do one better: If anyone is concerned about the nature/security of the site, here is the source code to NeoCities, ready for anyone to do a full security audit: https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web Pull requests welcome!

I don't think it's a smart idea to publish the source code to your site (especially while on the front page of Hacker News) until you've spent a significant amount of money on auditing the security internally to the point that others are comfortable with a public release.

Now it looks like something happened, and you've got no site, and thousands of people trying to access it!